All of Matt_Sharp's Comments + Replies

I sort of agree, but a couple of points:

1.  I think advice can be useful from those who have tried something but failed (though plausibly many of those who eventually succeeded will have initially failed). 
   1. If we only seek advice from those who have quite easily succeeded, we risk hearing a biased view of the world that may not be the best advice for us. We may have more in common with those who failed, and may be better off hearing from these people in order to avoid their mistakes.
2. Presumably, we would like to hear from a broad range of people who h

This sounds potentially valuable. However, it's important to establish what the added value of this project would be. 

What current processes/systems/databases do scientists currently use to identify relevant research and bacteria? What about these existing processes/systems/databases is most in need of improving? Which scientists in the field have you spoken to about this in order to identify the main challenges they face when using existing systems?

Also...is there a reason for only focusing on antibiotic producing bacteria and not including fungi?

Thanks for clarifying! 

Interesting point about Drinkaware - I didn't know it was partly industry-funded. Given this, even though I'd hope the information they provide is broadly accurate, I'm assuming it is more likely to be framed through the lens of personal choice rather than advocating for government action (e.g. higher taxes on alcohol).

I presume the $5-10M also only refers to alcohol-specific philanthropy? I would expect there to be some funding for it via adjacent topics, such as organisations that work on drugs/addiction more broadly, or ones that focus on promoting nutrition and healthy lifestyles. 

Some excellent points.

In addition, I'm confused about the figure of $5-10m for spending on alcohol. This is roughly how much is spent by just two alcohol charities in the UK (Drinkaware and Alcohol Research UK). So global philanthropic spending on alcohol is presumably much higher - and then there's also any government spending.

Perhaps the $5-10m figure is supposed to only apply to low and middle income countries, or money moved as part of development assistance for health?

I'm no longer going to engage with you because this comes across as being deliberately offensive and provocative.

Assuming that first claim is true, I'm not sure it follows that deferred donation looks even better. You'd still need to know about the marginal cost-effectiveness of the best interventions, which won't necessarily change at the same rate as the wider economy.

The cost-effectiveness of interventions doesn't necessarily stay fixed over time. We would expect it to get more expensive to save a life over time, as the lowest-hanging fruit should get picked first. 

(I'm not definitely saying that it's better to donate now rather than investing and donating later - the changing cost-effectiveness of interventions is just one thing that needs to be taken into account)

This is a useful analysis, and collectively I agree it suggests there has been a negative impact overall.

However, I think you may be overly confident when you say things like "FTX has had an obvious negative impact on the number of donors giving through EA Funds", and "Pledge data from Giving What We Can shows a clear and dramatic negative impact from FTX". 

The data appears to be consistent with this, but it could be consistent with other explanations (or, more likely, a combination of explanations including FTX). For example, over the past couple of ... (read more)

To the extent that this is based on game theory, it's probably worth considering that there may well be more than just 2 civilizations (at least over timescales of hundreds or thousands of years).

As well as Earth and Mars, there may be the Moon, Venus, and the moons of Jupiter and Saturn (and potentially others, maybe even giant space stations). As such, any unwarranted attack by one civilization on another might result in responses by the remaining civilizations. That could introduce some sort of deterrent effect on striking first.

I think the purpose of the 'overall karma' button on comments should be changed. 

Currently, it asks 'how much do you like this overall?'. I think this should be amended to something like 'how much do you think this is useful or important?'. 

This is because I think there is still a too strong correlation between 'liking' a comment, and 'agreeing' with it. 

For example, in the recent post about nonlinear, many people are downvoting comments by Kat and Emerson. Given that the post concerns their organisation, their responses should not be at ris... (read more)

This is a very helpful post. I'm surprised the events are so expensive, but breakdown of costs and explanations make sense.

That said, this makes me much more skeptical about the value of EAG given the alternative potential uses of funds - even just in terms of other types of events. 

As suggested by Ozzie, I'd definitely like to see a comparison with the potential value of smaller events, as well as experimentation. 

Spending $2k per person might be good value, but I think we could do better. Perhaps there is an analogy with cash transfers as a ben... (read more)

Nice study, thanks for sharing!

Environmental and health concerns were found to be of increasing importance among those adopting their diet more recently, which may reflect increasing awareness of and advocacy regarding possible health benefits of plant-based diets, as well as increasing concerns over anthropogenic climate change

Could this also be due to survivorship bias? If environmental/health motivations are associated with giving up being veg*n sooner than animal welfare motivations, then in cohorts that adopted their diet longer ago, relatively more of the environmental/health motivated people would have dropped out compared to more recent cohorts. 

It costs time to read it! Do you happen to know of a 10 minute summary of the key points? 

I'd also note that hundreds of billions of dollars are spent on biomedical research generally each year. While most of this isn't targeted at anti-aging specifically, there will be a fair amount of spillover that benefits anti-aging research, in terms of increased understanding of genes, proteins, cell biology etc.

Thanks for sharing!

Our funding bar went up at the end of 2022, in response to a decrease in the overall funding available to long-term future-focused projects

Is there anywhere that describes what the funding bar is and how you decided on it? This seem relevant to several recent discussions on the Forum, e.g. this, this, and this.

Sounds like he'd be good to have at the debate! But it seems very unlikely he'll make the first one in a few weeks time. There seem to be 3 requirements to qualify for the first debate:

1. Pledge support for the eventual nominee. Hurd has said he won't do this.
2. (from 538) "they must earn 1 percent support in three national polls, or in two national polls and two polls from the first four states voting in the GOP primary, each coming from separate states, based on polls recognized by the RNC and conducted in July and August before the debate."
   1. "As of Sunday [July

Re 2 - ah yeah, I was assuming that at least one alien civilisation would aim to 'technologize the Local Supercluster' if humans didn't. If they all just decided to stick to their own solar system or not spread sentience/digital minds, then of course that would be a loss of experiences.

Thanks for clarifying 1 and 3!

Interesting read, and a tricky topic! A few thoughts:

1. What were the reasons for tentatively suggesting using the median estimate of the commenters, rather than being consistent with the SoGive neartermist threshold?
2. One reason against using the very high-end of the range is the plausible existence of alien civilisations. If humanity goes extinct, but there are many other potential civilisations and we think they have similar moral value to humans, then preventing human extinction is less valuable.
   1. You could try using an adapted version of the Drake equation t

Assuming it could be implemented, I definitely think your approach would help prevent the imposition of serious harms. 

I still intuitively think the AI could just get stuck though, given the range of contradictory views even in fairly mainstream moral and political philosophy. It would need to have a process for making decisions under moral uncertainty, which might entail putting additional weight on the views on certain philosophers. But because this is (as far as I know) a very recent area of ethics, the only existing work could be quite badly flawe... (read more)

Under that constraint, I wonder if the AI would be free to do anything at all. 

I believe CEA's general lack of engagement with social media (and with some traditional media) was a deliberate choice of not wanting EA to grow too quickly, and because of concerns about the 'fidelity' of ideas. See e.g. this CEA blog post. There has been some previous discussion of this on the Forum, e.g. here and here.

I don't know if this is still their approach, or will be once they have a new Executive Director in place.

This post seems very much aligned with (and perhaps inspired by) this highly commended article and this podcast.

Supporting economic growth seems to be very much a mainstream, common-sense idea (in the UK at least it receives a fair amount of coverage in the press). Given this, I'm not convinced simply talking about the benefits of economic growth is particularly valuable. However, perhaps you'll be recommending particular career paths, neglected policies, or organisations that may have a particularly outsized impact on promoting growth and could be support... (read more)

Fair point - it might be 'sizable minority' then (say 25-40%) rather than small majority who aren't in a position to give >10%. 

I agree with the overall claims.

However, with regards to Claim 1:

There are good reasons for some people to not give at some points in their lives — for instance, if it leaves someone with insufficient resources to live a comfortable life, or if it would interfere strongly with the impact someone could have in their career. However, I expect these situations will be the exception rather than the rule within the current EA community, ^[6] and even where they do apply there are often ways around them (e.g. exceptions to the Pledge for students and people

I may also be missing something major, but I was thinking of opportunity cost in terms of the foregone benefits achieved by donating to another organisation.

If funds are allocated to future programs (or programs that require a long time to implement), they won't count as being in the reserves. 

Ah yeah - in that case I think my point would only apply if the org was increasing its overall revenue and expenditure.

Yeah, having some reserves is obviously sensible risk management. 

But if an organisation has a policy of holding 3-5 years worth of reserves, this implies that for every dollar donated which is used on its activities in a given year, another 3-5 dollars worth of donations simply ends up sitting in a bank. 

When there are many other EA-aligned organisations doing valuable work that are struggling for funding, the opportunity cost appears substantial.

Assessment of reserves seems most useful when considering organisations that would otherwise be recommended because their activities seem valuable, so it's not like Castle Buying Charity would be recommended just for having a sensible reserves policy. 

I didn't downvote. However, here are a few reasons why others may have done so:

• The idea intuitively sounds like it could be beneficial. However, lots of ideas that sound promising either don't work at all, only have a small beneficial effect, or sometimes even have a harmful effect. What evidence do you have (perhaps from similar ideas already being implemented elsewhere) to show that your idea will work?
• We have limited resources available to help improve the world. Given this, we should first focus our resources on where we can have the biggest impact. Yo

Agreed that it probably makes sense to be closer to 60 years, or maybe even a bit lower (though if there are major advances in life-extension over the coming decades, then it could be much higher for young children who will have the most chance to benefit). 

I'd note that health-related quality of life is likely to be less than 1 per year, perhaps 0.7 or 0.8.

Regarding counterfactual mortality, wouldn't this largely be taken into account of in the overall estimate of life expectancy? Though this overall estimate probably doesn't include things like major catastrophes (devastating pandemics, x-risks)

This is a good point, and it's likely that for many people there will be quite a wide range in the variance of how they experience a disability. If so, then you'd expect most people with a given disability to disagree with the GBD weight, simply because they would personally rate it somewhat higher or lower than the average value.

EDIT to add: In fact it seems the 2010 GBD weights were obtained by surveying members of the public, so it could be the case that the weights are either higher or lower than most individuals with a given disability would have indicated if they had been asked.

I agree that 'most of the badness of death comes from the person losing future happy life'.

However, there are also other factors that are relevant to whether 'preventing a person's existence is close to as bad as killing them' (this obviously also depends what is meant by 'close to').

The claim seems to imply that we are doing something almost as bad as murder if we are failing to have as many children as possible. But a society where legislation reflected this position would reduce the quality of life of people who don't want many (or any) children, would ... (read more)

From a consequentialist utilitarian perspective, there is also the impact on those that know the existing person. 

The death of an existing person often causes suffering and loss for those that know them. Whereas preventing the existence of a future person typically does not cause this wider suffering (except perhaps in some cases, e.g. when parents strongly desire a child but are unable to conceive).

This is a reasonable argument, and seems quite plausible for farmed animals.

I think the biggest uncertainty here - at least in terms of impact on animals - is what each additional human life means for wild animals. If wild animals typically have net negative lives, and more humans reduces the number of wild animals, then perhaps family planning charities aren't beneficial for animals overall.

"Write a long essay on the risks associated with writing a very short post as an April Fool's day prank" :)

April Fool's day is a time when many individuals and companies choose to play pranks on their friends, family, and clients for a good laugh. While it can be a fun way to break the monotony of daily routines, pranking others can sometimes backfire and cause unintended consequences. This is especially true when it comes to writing a very short post as an April Fool's day prank.

One of the primary risks involved in writing a very short post as an April Fool's day prank is the possibility of offending or upsetting someone. If the joke is crafted in a way that t... (read more)

I welcome the footnote setting out the detailed cost calculation. 

It is this commitment to rigour and transparency that demonstrates the intellectual and moral superiority of effective altruists compared to other humans, and, indeed, all sentient life.

Both Will and Toby place moral weight on the non-person-affecting view, where preventing the creation of a happy person is as bad as killing them!

I'm not sure supporters of non-person-affecting views would endorse this exact claim, if only because a lot of people would likely be very upset if you killed their friend/family member. 

From the perspective of long-termism, it seems plausible to me that countries with very rapidly growing populations, and that don't allow women the ability to control whether and when to reproduce, may be less politically st... (read more)

Thanks for the reply and for the edits made to your post.

To me this underlines the point that individual donors aren’t best placed to set priorities for what a countries or population needs. 

I agree with this, but I don't know what this implies in terms of my decisions about where to donate.

An example: let's assume that, if we ignore the six key issues discussed in your paper, a donation of £5000 to the Against Malaria Foundation (AMF) will (in expectation) save one life. 

If we now take into account the six key issues, what does that imply? If I ... (read more)

Hi Tom, welcome to the forum :)

A suggestion: perhaps you could edit your post to include the key arguments/lines of thinking. Both articles seem pretty interesting - you might get more engagement if the key points are included in the main post rather than requiring people to click away and read through the documents.

From the abstract of the first article:

We propose a new model that aims to address these challenges: that domestic finances should support essential health services and health aid should primarily be used to expand the package of affordable ser

Thanks for the reply! I agree having a directory seems potentially useful, and also that there could plausibly be some cases where having familiarity with EA could be particularly beneficial. Hopefully you're documenting such cases and can point to examples. I'm just a bit wary that sometimes there seems to be a reluctance to use outside experts.

I liked this and would encourage you to publish it as a top-level post.

How did you identify "services that there is a high demand for but not enough supply"? Is it simply based on the "quick look" you did, or is there some other evidence? 

The absence of EA services could simply be evidence of sufficient non-EA services, in which case it's probably worth thinking about the pros and cons of having EA services. 

The most obvious justification seems to be to keep money in the community, and/or to provide services at a relative discount. 

However, by relying on EA services there is a risk of missing out on the highest... (read more)

Why is it inadequate to use language associated with Bayes in an informal analysis? Are you suggesting that when people communicate about their beliefs in day-to-day conversation, they should only do so after using Dirichlet or another related process? Can you see how that is, in fact, extremely impractical? Can you see how it is rational to take into account the costs and benefits of using a particular technique, and while empirical robustness may sometimes be overwhelmingly important in some contexts, it is not always rational to use a  method in so... (read more)